Apple Software Developer Says OS X is Rotting to the Core

It's not often you hear an Apple user bash his platform, especially a relatively high profile one like Lloyd Chambers, a photography enthusiast and author of the Macintosh Performance Guide. Chambers, who worked as a professional software engineer for 25 years and has been using Macs since they first appeared in the 1980s, wrote an interesting piece on what he perceives is an ongoing degradation of the OS X platform.

"Over the past few years a semi-conscious unease has been steadily growing in my mind: OS X is not getting more reliable and more stable, it is instead developing more and nastier problems that range from interference with getting work done to potential data loss," Chambers explains. "This unease is now consciously realized, hence my decision to publish this series of pages and to no longer ignore the eruption of a serious bug, but to document it."

His complaints are numerous and varied. One of the first ones he brings up is that OS X is degrading into a base for an entertainment platform, signaling a downhill trend for serious work. He also takes issue with the "fast and furious" OS updates that carry a lot of hype but "little of real value."

Reading through his essay, you might find it hard to believe he's a Mac user, as he dubs iTunes a "nightmarish kitchen sink design" and iCloud an "organization-destroying bug-ridden unreliable disaster."

We could go on, but you get the point. Like a scorned lover, Chambers holds little back in criticizing the platform that he feels is growing apart from him, but it's not a breakup letter.

"The goal here is for Apple to step up to the plate and engage in responsible OS X development; some of these issues are absolutely unacceptable even in a single minor release, but to see them persist for months or years is unforgivable," Chambers says.